Originally published 11/16/2011Mike can weld. I say this both in the sense that he has the knowledge to do so, and is pretty darn good at it. As the title says, there are quite a few benefits to haveing a print shop that also includes a great deal of welding, metal and wood cutting tools, and more. For instance, we just printed these shirts for our buddy Jay at Complete Fabrications in San Francisco ("Evil Minds that Plot Construction" - www.completefabrications.com) on our custom in-house made platens (more on these soon!) that we use on both of our Hopkins presses. Mike cuts the aluminum with a plasma cutter, attaches brackets to the bottom for a clamp, and we have custom aluminum platens!

We also got a new 24"x24" oversize flash heater from Black Body (Thanks Jackie @ Black-Body! www.BBCind.com). We just bought the guts, but Mike welded up a kickass harness for the guts (pictured below), which is a super affordable, do-it-yourself method to get flash setup . . . if you can weld.